Author Archive
Mark Nowak
Labor Love
Late last year, The Monserrat Reporter published an article whose title begins “Deputy Governor of Montserrat writes book…” We can all imagine the subject matter of hardcovers that would be penned by (or ghostwritten for), say, the governor of Wyoming or Alabama or New Jersey or _________ (fill in your favorite state). In fact, just last night on Charlie Rose the former governor of West Virginia (Bob Wise) was out pumping his new book Raising the Grade: How High School Reform Can Save Our Youth and Our Nation. Let’s just say it didn’t quite sound like Michael Apple.
But back to The Monserrat Reporter, which late last year ran an article whose full title read (in full) “Deputy Governor of Montserrat writes book about Lasana Sekou.” Born in Aruba in 1959 and reared in St. Martin until he was 13, Sekou has since published more than a dozen books of poetry, non-fiction and other imaginative writings including Maroon Lives…for the Grenadian Freedom Fighters, Big Up St. Martin—Essay & Poem, The Salt Reaper—Poems from the flats and most recently Brotherhood of the Spurs.
Mark Nowak
The 1970s, (Dub) Identity, and Working-class Poetries
Amidst the engaging recent posts by Peter O’Leary on the “Poetry of the 1970s” conference in Maine and Alan Gilbert on poetry and identity/identifying practices—as well as steering away from the seemingly looming question of whether or not I ever was a member of the Communist party!—I wanted to continue to post &/or discuss poems that I’ve used or plan to use in my factory and workplace workshops, poems that push the political and the innovative in myriad ways yet always include a race/class overlay or overdetermination (rather than fronting one at the expense of the other) as well as poems that scale back and forth between the local and the global. So, having already written about U Sam Oeur’s “Work at the Douglas Corporation, Urethane Department…” and Emelihter Kihleng’s “Micronesian Diaspora(s),” let me add a poem that I think it would be most productive to read alongside any 1970s configuration of poetry that has been inscribed to include Late Capitalism and Language as well as poets such as Tom Raworth and Clark Coolidge and Bernadette Mayer (to cite just a few mentioned by O’Leary), Linton Kwesi Johnson’s “It Dread Inna Inglan”:
dem frame-up George Lindo
up in Bradford Toun
but di Bradford Blacks
dem a rally roun
Mark Nowak
Poetry is a verb
I poetry. You poetry. He/she/it poetries. We poetry. You poetry. They poetry.
That’s my conjugation.
Early in the process of developing my transnational social movement “poetry dialogues,” when I was asked by the education directors at NUMSA (National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa) to lead a series of two-day, eight-hour per day poetry workshops at Ford plants in Port Elizabeth and Pretoria, I formulated a schedule that included a “first person singular” poetry day and a “first person plural” day. In the former, autoworkers would read poems like U Sam Oeur’s “Work at the Douglas Corporation, Urethane Department, Minneapolis, Minnesota” and view digital videos of workers from my previous workshops; they would then write individual, often documentary/reportage poems (think Tillie Olsen’s “I want you women up north to know”) about their experiences.
One the second day, the “first person plural” day, I devised a series of exercises for workers to collectively compose collaborative “choral” poems from their experiences, poems that they would then perform as a chorus of workers. If interested, you can find printed examples of both types of poems online in the UAW 879’s October-November 2006 newsletter. [Note: they are not meant to be center-justified, but oh well…]
Yesterday, somewhere between the boyhood home of Sinclair Lewis and the city of Fargo, I facilitated another one of my trade union poetry workshops for Education MN (who represent 70,000 public educators from across the state).
Mark Nowak
Zimbabwe
The news from Zimbabwe is terrifying and rapidly escalating. Two days ago, opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai withdrew from the run-off elections. I read this morning that Tsvangirai has now sought refuge in the Dutch embassy in Harare and that Britain will lead a campaign to declare that Mugabe is no longer the leader of Zimbabwe. But what else will be done, or not be done, by the rest of the world this time?
I had wanted to write yesterday about how, amidst what is occurring and what we can only hope may and may not yet occur in Zimbabwe, labor groups were still pushing unique cultural aesthetics to address the current situation–how the TUC assembled photos of 2,000 trade unionists (mine, you’ll find, as part of one eye) for a massive Chuck Close-esque banner to be used at protests today in London; how, on the way to my poetry workshops at Education MN, I want to inform all teachers about teachers murdered in the days leading up to the Zimbabwe elections; how, here at the Harriet blog, we can maybe listen to at least one poet from Zimbabwe speak, Comrade Fatso’s “What’s up guys…? (Click on the link in the top left corner to hear him read the poem.)
Mark Nowak
Late-Late-Fordist Poetics
When I was invited to be a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota this past spring, English Department Chair Paula Rabinowitz asked that one of the classes I teach be a senior seminar based, loosely, on the “poetry dialogues” I’d been facilitating between Ford workers at the closing St. Paul Assembly plant here in Minnesota and autoworkers at downsizing Ford plants in Port Elizabeth and Pretoria, South Africa.
As I planned the syllabus, I went back over the central points I forwarded in my critique of MFA-land, “Neoliberalism, Collective Action, and the American MFA Industry” as well as the propositions I’d made for alternative models: the CP’s John Reed Clubs, the “Talleres de Poesia” of the Sandinistas, the Johnson-Forest Tendency (C.L.R. James, Grace Lee (Boggs), and Raya Dunayevskaya), and others. The eventual syllabus included some of this work, additional readings such as Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, visits from St. Paul Ford worker-poets, and films such as Roger and Me and Travis Wilkerson’s extraordinary An Injury to One (I’d also wanted to show Jeremy Deller’s Battle of Orgreave but couldn’t get it in my hands in time).
The final charge on the syllabus was that students had to organize, facilitate, and document (preferably using iMovie or GarageBand or digital photography with accompanying sound files, etc.) work- and/or community-based “poetry dialogues.” Additionally, I promised students that since they would be leading workplace poetry workshops, I would as well (I’m still working on editing footage from mine, with clerical workers from AFSCME 3800 who went on strike against the University in fall 2007 and read their poems to the University community at the “Late American Poetics and the Politics of Exception” symposium).
Mark Nowak
Office of Insular Affairs = Poetry?
It’s not every day that a poetry collection I write a blurb for appears on the U.S. Department of Interior “Office of Insular Affairs” website. OK, so I’m one of those US poets imbricated in party politics: I read on a 2004 Democratic campaign stop with former VP Walter Mondale and then VP candidate John Edwards (though Edwards’ plane, perhaps foreshadowing the 2004 election results, was delayed for nearly two hours to clear airspace for current Vice President Dick Cheney’s Labor Day arrival for a Republican crowd here in ’Sota). Additionally, I used to be a writer for local Green party campaigns and was chair of the Political Issues committee of the National Writers’ Union Local (and its representative at the Minnesota AFL-CIO convention in the first years of this new century, back in the Paul Wellstone days). Maybe we can talk about the over-riding contemporary separation of poetics (church) and politics (state) at some later date…
A poem from this poetry collection announced on the Department of Interior website, Emelihter Kihleng’s My Urohs, opened XCP no. 14 and I’ve been a fan of her writing ever since, watching for its appearance in such innovative journals as Tinfish, boundary2, Chain, and others. Here’s what I wrote when she approached me to pen something about her first book:
Mark Nowak
NAFTA Superhighway Poetics
Driving the width of USAmerica from Minnesota to Texas and back as I did the past two weeks (and may again later this summer), I began to imagine somewhere in Kansas or Missouri what a tri-national, social, cultural, and politicized middle North American poetry and poetics would look like, sound like, and read like. It’s a thought I return to with some regularity–child of rust-belt Buffalo, educated on the outskirts of Toledo, sequestered the past two decades at the western edge of the Great Lakes, or, as Lorine Niedecker called the region, “North Central” (though that’s perhaps a more apt moniker for Thunder Bay or Nunavut than south-east Wisconsin). Having read and studied the New York Schools and San Francisco Renaissances of the previous century, as well as the countless other coastal poetry and poetics communities of eras far and close, I can’t help but try to imagine a geography of North America poetry production centers recalibrated along a North-South Central axis.
Try to imagine a continuum that begins with Magnus Einarsson’s Icelandic Canadian Popular Verse composed on farms north of Winnipeg and ends with Subcomandante Marcos’s versification at the Zapatista Encuentro “for humanity and against neoliberalism” in Chiapas in 1996; try to imagine “the port of Kansas City” (as some of the NAFTA superhighway literature describes) and its potential poet laureate Diane Glancy–her book Claiming Breath is central, I think, to any reading of what, here in the US nation-state, we might imaginatively dub an emergent US-35 literary tradition.
Mark Nowak
“I Hear America Singing”
More than a decade ago, just after I’d published the first issue of XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics, a sheaf of poems arrived at my office. They were bi-lingual poems (in Khmer & English) from a poet then new to me, U Sam Oeur, whose collection Sacred Vows was scheduled to be published in 1998. I fell in love with the poems, and published two of them (“Neo-Pol Pot” and “Work at the Douglas Corporation, Urethane Department, Minneapolis, Minnesota”) in the second issue of XCP. Shortly after receiving the poems, I invited Sam to give a reading to open the conference I was organizing with Maria Damon at the University of Minnesota to celebrate the launch of the journal. The poems, read by Sam, hooked me deep. When XCP no. 2 appeared, I invited Sam to give a reading at the community college where I teach.
Over the following years we remained in touch as Sam eventually moved from Minnesota to Texas, and when his haunting and immensely powerful autobiography, Crossing Three Wildernesses appeared in 2005, I again invited Sam to read from it at my school and spent a wonderful afternoon with him at an Argentine restaurant. Having studied and taught Sam’s work for a dozen years or so, I’m still completely engaged and inspired by his invocation and exploration of the Whitman “democratic” and the Whitman line, which additionally includes his ongoing work translating Whitman into Khmer; the way his poetry and prose invokes and (re)scales the personal, the local, the nation-state, and the global; the way humanity continually surges against, and directly in the face of, the horrors of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
So when I found out that I was going to be in Fort Worth, Texas, for a week, I immediately emailed Sam and asked if I could drive out and visit with him. That absolutely wonderful late morning and early afternoon was yesterday.
Mark Nowak
Like a Rock?
More notes on the Working Class, Obama, and “the superstructure of poetry”
Alan’s excellent post and the excellent running commentary have pushed me to try to clarify a few things in my earlier entry. First off, by my use of “contemporary poetry” (and Alan is right to read a hint of skepticism) I mean the entire realm of the field, inclusive of poets, poems, publishers (journal and book), reviews, institutions (university and non-university based–MFA programs and the MLA or the Green Mill, for example), etc. We might call it “the superstructure of poetry.”
And while I don’t necessarily want to single it out as example, the poem of Adam’s published as a comment to Alan’s post, printed in Living Forge (which also ran a few of my poems several years ago), signifies the precise type of “working class” poem I’m trying to argue against in my initial posts. For me, while solid in the almost canonical working class tradition, “Doing my part for the tool and die industry” repeats what became in the early years of deindustrialization and neoliberalism (the 1970s and the 1980s in particular) the standardized stereotypical lyrical gaze from the factory floor, inscribed almost exclusively as male, white (verging on racist in its excision of race from its view–see David Roediger’s magnificent Wages of Whiteness for one of the best takes on this), heterosexual (sexist) and heteronormative, etc.
Mark Nowak
Tracing the Lines
“Tracing the Lines: A Symposium on Contemporary Poetics & Cultural Politics in Honour of Roy Miki”
Over the course of the past half decade or so, I’ve been invited to speak at conferences celebrating the retirement of two seminal Canadian writers, Fred Wah (University of Calgary in Alberta) and Roy Miki (Simon Fraser University in BC). Since I started my blogging here at Harriet with some notes on restaurant culture and class, let me start by saying a few words about Wah’s work and then move on to Miki and the “Tracing the Lines” conference.
If one were to be asked to give as gift a single book to the waitresses and fast food/diner restaurant workers of the world, my choice would be Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill. Dubbed both a “biotext” and a “gastro-graphy” (by Rosalia Baena in her essay on Wah in a recent issue of the Canadian Ethnic Studies Journal)–though probably oversimplified as memoir by the stateside genre gendarmes–Diamond Grill is a stunningly lyrical-critical reading of the everyday workings of race and class in a family owned diner in Nelson, BC. Unlike the elegiac tone (and form) that subsumes so much US class-based writing (where working people, it seems, are always doomed to their material conditions and live lives utterly without agency), Wah’s Grill serves as a site of constant race-class negotiations and is written in a way that pushes far beyond the standard working class social realism. (Maybe, at some point, I’ll blog on the excellent commentary on my first post and try to sketch out some terrain for what I see as a much-needed shift from social to socialist realism in contemporary working class poetics–there’s a hint of it in my invocation of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People articulated to the Johnson-Forest Tendency of C.L.R. James, Grace Lee (Boggs), and Raya Dunayevskaya).
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Anselm Berrigan
Abigail Deutsch
Tonya Foster
Melissa Friedling
John S. O'Connor
Barbara Jane Reyes
Amber Tamblyn
Edwin Torres
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Michael Marcinkowski
Travis Nichols
Fred Sasaki
Don Share
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